| 1. |
- Ensor, Jonathan Edward, et al.
(författare)
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Asking the right questions in adaptation research and practice : Seeing beyond climate impacts in rural Nepal
- 2019
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Ingår i: Environmental Science and Policy. - : Elsevier BV. - 1462-9011 .- 1873-6416. ; 94, s. 227-236
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Adaptation research and practice too often overlooks the wider social context within which climate change is experienced. Mainstream approaches frame adaptation problems in terms of the consequences that flow from biophysical impacts and as a result, we argue, ask the wrong questions. A complementary approach gaining ground in the field, foregrounding the social, economic and political context, reveals differentiation in adaptation need, and how climate impacts interconnect with wider processes of change. In this paper, we illustrate how this kind of approach frames a different set of questions about adaptation using the case of Nepal. Drawing on fieldwork and a review of literature, we contrast the questions that emerge from adaptation research and practice that take climate risk as a starting point with the questions that emerge from examination of contemporary rural livelihoods. We find that while adaptation efforts are often centred around securing agricultural production and are predicated on climate risk management, rural livelihoods are caught in a wider process of transformation. The numbers of people involved in farming are declining, and households are experiencing the effects of rising education, abandonment of rural land, increasing wages, burgeoning mechanisation, and high levels of migration into the global labour market. We find the epistemological framing of adaptation too narrow to account for these changes, as it understands the experiences of rural communities through the lens of climate risk. We propose that rather than seeking to integrate local understandings into a fixed, impacts-orientated epistemology, it is necessary to premise adaptation on an epistemology capable of exploring how change occurs. Asking the right questions thus means opening up adaptation by asking: ‘what are the most significant changes taking place in people's lives?’, along with the more standard: ‘what are the impacts of climate change?’ Viewing adaptation as occurring between and within these two perspectives has the potential to reveal new vulnerabilities and opportunities for adaptation practice to act upon.
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| 2. |
- Otero, Noelia, et al.
(författare)
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A multi-model comparison of meteorological drivers of surface ozone over Europe
- 2018
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Ingår i: Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. - : Copernicus GmbH. - 1680-7316 .- 1680-7324. ; 18:16, s. 12269-12288
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The implementation of European emission abatement strategies has led to a significant reduction in the emissions of ozone precursors during the last decade. Ground-level ozone is also influenced by meteorological factors such as temperature, which exhibit interannual variability and are expected to change in the future. The impacts of climate change on air quality are usually investigated through air-quality models that simulate interactions between emissions, meteorology and chemistry. Within a multi-model assessment, this study aims to better understand how air-quality models represent the relationship between meteorological variables and surface ozone concentrations over Europe. A multiple linear regression (MLR) approach is applied to observed and modelled time series across 10 European regions in springtime and summertime for the period of 2000-2010 for both models and observations. Overall, the air-quality models are in better agreement with observations in summertime than in springtime and particularly in certain regions, such as France, central Europe or eastern Europe, where local meteorological variables show a strong influence on surface ozone concentrations. Larger discrepancies are found for the southern regions, such as the Balkans, the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean basin, especially in springtime. We show that the air-quality models do not properly reproduce the sensitivity of surface ozone to some of the main meteorological drivers, such as maximum temperature, relative humidity and surface solar radiation. Specifically, all air-quality models show more limitations in capturing the strength of the ozone-relative-humidity relationship detected in the observed time series in most of the regions, for both seasons. Here, we speculate that dry-deposition schemes in the air-quality models might play an essential role in capturing this relationship. We further quantify the relationship between ozone and maximum temperature (m(o3-T), climate penalty) in observations and air-quality models. In summertime, most of the air-quality models are able to reproduce the observed climate penalty reasonably well in certain regions such as France, central Europe and northern Italy. However, larger discrepancies are found in springtime, where air-quality models tend to overestimate the magnitude of the observed climate penalty.
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| 3. |
- Ringsmuth, Andrew K., et al.
(författare)
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Lessons from COVID-19 for managing transboundary climate risks and building resilience
- 2022
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Ingår i: Climate Risk Management. - : Elsevier. - 2212-0963. ; 35
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- COVID-19 has revealed how challenging it is to manage global, systemic and compounding crises. Like COVID-19, climate change impacts, and maladaptive responses to them, have potential to disrupt societies at multiple scales via networks of trade, finance, mobility and communication, and to impact hardest on the most vulnerable. However, these complex systems can also facilitate resilience if managed effectively. This review aims to distil lessons related to the transboundary management of systemic risks from the COVID-19 experience, to inform climate change policy and resilience building. Evidence from diverse fields is synthesised to illustrate the nature of systemic risks and our evolving understanding of resilience. We describe research methods that aim to capture systemic complexity to inform better management practices and increase resil-ience to crises. Finally, we recommend specific, practical actions for improving transboundary climate risk management and resilience building. These include mapping the direct, cross-border and cross-sectoral impacts of potential climate extremes, adopting adaptive risk management strategies that embrace heterogenous decision-making and uncertainty, and taking a broader approach to resilience which elevates human wellbeing, including societal and ecological resilience.
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